We’ve highlighted the comic art of Montreal-based Julian Peters before on Open Culture. He’s the man who undertook a 24-page illustrated adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and then also delivered a manga version of W. B. Yeats’ “When You Are Old,” recreating the style of Japanese romance comics to a T.

This adaptation (above) of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” dates from 2011. Poe’s work gives illustrators narrative aplenty, but it also gives them repetition and ellipses. In his rendition, Peters gives us two pre-teen sweethearts similar to Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, and when Annabel Lee dies from “the wind that came out of the cloud by night,” we get a full panel of Annabel’s final healthy moments. Wind is everywhere to be found in the comic, forming white caps on the ocean, and blowing Annabel’s pigtails when we first see her.

Scholars tend to agree that “AnnabelLee” was based on Poe’s first cousin and teen bride Virginia Clemm, whom he married when she was 13 (and Poe was 27), but who passed away from tuberculosis at 24 years of age. The image of the beautiful corpse continues through his work from “The Raven” to “Ligeia“.

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

I’ve been working on a massive Edgar Allan Poe blog project, attempting to assemble in one place every Poe comics adaptation I can find. I currently have stories up from 1944-1979… starting with the Gilberton “CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED” version of… “Annabel Lee”.

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.